Brass cartridge cases become tarnished with time and use. The cartridge neck, if not the body, has to be cleaned of carbonated powder residue every time before it can be resized in an appropriate caliber dye and eventually reloaded. This cartridge case cleaning ritual has been accomplished in the past by employing various methods ranging from soaking the cases in various solutions for several hours, to scouring the case's exterior with steel wool or other abrasive compounds. These methods are less than satisfactory being both time consuming and messy.
A recent improvement in this field has been the introduction of rotating or vibrating tumblers filled with abrasive media into which the cartridge cases are placed. This is currently the preferred method of cartridge case cleaning. However, these tumbler/vibrators are very expensive and are generally out of reach of the average shooter. They are also very slow. It may take 6-12 hours to clean one load of brass cartridge cases adquately.
The cleaning tool of the present application is not limited to cleaning cartridge cases and can also be used to clean the exterior of other tubular members. In this regard, prior art tube cleaning devices include:
U.S. Pat. No. 3,188,674, Hobbs
U.S. Pat. No. 4,301,567, Tucker
U.S. Pat. No. 2,866,212, White
U.S. Pat. No. 4,238,867, Ruggero
U.S. Pat. No. 4,468,829, Christensen.
Unlike the prior art, the cleaning tool of the present application is able to clean tubes of varying diameter simultaneously.